Paul Shread

Dell is taking aim at Apple’s red-hot iPod. Dell is offering its Digital Jukebox for $99 — $100 off — for customers who send in an iPod, as the company tries to get a bigger piece of the handheld device market. As part of the offer, Dell is also offering 25 free music downloads at […]

The Nasdaq (first chart below) closed right at 2040 resistance today. It’s hard to imagine the first rate hike in four years as cause for celebration, but stranger things have happened. 2013-2014 is important support for tomorrow. If either of those levels go tomorrow, support is 2007, 2000 and 1990, and resistance is 2060 and […]

Research in Motion did exactly what investors expected after the close on Tuesday: the company beat estimates and raised guidance. Shares of RIMM jumped 8% after hours after the BlackBerry maker reported earnings of 36 cents a share, four cents ahead of estimates. Revenues of $269.6 million topped $263.2 million forecasts, and the company raised […]

Which way will the market head after June 30? If recent history is any guide, the direction could be down. The Fed has raised interest rates three times since 1994, and each time, a correction of three weeks or longer followed the first rate increase. Even in mid-1999, the Dow edged higher for two weeks […]

Handheld devices have been just about the hottest thing in the stock market this year, be it Apple’s blistering iPod sales or the soaring success of palmOne’s Treo and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices. Hardware may have about the lowest barrier to entry in the tech sector, but so far that trio has done just […]

On the plus side, the internals were very strong today, with advancers leading decliners and new 52-week highs and lows both heading in the right direction, and major support levels held. On the downside, we had a little too much complacency among options traders for a down day. The Nasdaq (first chart below) finally took […]

Corporate earnings are the strongest they’ve been in years, but there remains quite a gap between the haves and the have nots. AT&T plunged 10% Thursday after warning that revenues this year will come in well below estimates, battered by pricing pressures and the potential loss of discount local wholesale prices. University of Phoenix Online […]

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Silicon Graphics have partnered to develop new storage technology for data-intensive computing. The two will conduct research into “active storage,” an effort to shift computation and transformation of data from client computers to storage devices. Eng Lim Goh, SGI’s chief technology officer, claims the effort […]

A strong performance today. The Nasdaq (first chart below) was the only major index that didn’t hit a new high for the move today, stopping just short of 2023 resistance. Next up is 2035-2040, 2060 and 2079, and 2000-2010 should now be strong support. The S&P (second chart) took out 1139-1142 resistance, which should now […]

The red-hot dot-com IPO has returned. Blue Nile got the ball rolling in May, but at least the online jeweler is profitable. The latest hot IPOs — Blackboard and Salesforce.com — more closely resemble their late-1990s predecessors in that they are barely profitable, if profitable at all. Blackboard lost $1.4 million last year, but at […]

Tuesday was a bull market in takeover rumors. First came rumors that Microsoft would acquire Network Associates . Network Associates officials later said the rumors were unfounded, but the stock gained 4% on the day anyway, while rival Symantec slipped 2%. While Network Associates insists it’s not up for sale, investors could be forgiven for […]

Onaro has unveiled software that the company says can predict and prevent problems in storage area networks (SANs) before they occur. The Boston-based startup, which announced a $7.75 million funding round in April, claims that 80% of SAN availability problems and brownouts result from SAN changes, making change management “by far the greatest challenge in […]